Word: metafisica
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There was, however, nothing particularly revolutionary about his paintings. Seeking a credible genius costume, he did versions of Cubism, of De Chirico's pittura metafisica, and developed his dry, classicizing realism in such images as Seated Girl Seen from the Back, 1925. It is an easy matter to go through this early work identifying, here and there, what would grow and what would not: how the taste for smoothly curved profile and deep black relief that he got from Amedee Ozenfant's decorative Cubism, for instance, turned into Dali's later fondness for writhing, spookily dark shadows cast by figures...
This phase of his work-the so-called pittura metafisica-lasted until about 1918. Thereafter, De Chirico changed. He wanted to become, and almost succeeded in becoming, a classicist. He imagined himself to be the heir of Titian. Rejected by the French avantgarde, he struck back with disputatious critiques of modernist degeneracy; for the next 60 years of his life, he remained an obdurate though not very skillful academic painter. He even took to signing his work Pictor Optimus (the best painter). The sheer scale of his failure-if that is the word for it-is almost as fascinating...
...Disquieting Muses, 1917, all done between 1945 and 1962. Many of these facsimiles, backdated, were sold as original pittura metafisica...
Between 1912 and 1920, De Chirico produced a series of images?his pittura metafisica, or metaphysical painting?that altered the history of modernism. His empty colonnades and squares, populated by statues and shadows, exerted a vast influence on the growth of a specifically surrealist art. Max Ernst, René Magritte and Salvador Dali all paid homage to the liberating power of early De Chirico. He seemed to have made the actions of the dreaming mind more accessible, vivid and poignant than any other painter. "If a work of art is to be truly immortal," he explained, "it must pass quite beyond...
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